My Search for the Wild Hunt

There is a rock band on YouTube called Therion who has recorded a song called "The Wild Hunt." I
came across them while searching for a story by Charles deLint (mis-remembering the title). While this
musical genre is not really my cup of tea, I do have a fascination with the story of the Wild Hunt and
finding this band served the purpose of renewing my personal "Search for the Wild Hunt." With a cup of
Darjeeling (which is my preferred cuppa tea...) and a little Celtic fiddle on the radio I will begin
my tale...

Many years ago, before career and grown-up responsibilities set in, I attended a dinner gathering
with kindred spirits who, like me, loved to gather odd bits of folklore and spent evenings sharing music
from the ballad tradition of the British Isles and Appalachia. It was a rare balmy October evening in
Seattle and we stepped out to look out over the city's lights onto the wide deck that graced our meeting
place: a Queen Anne era home on Capitol Hill. While we were enjoying the view, the moon rose over the
horizon full and brilliantly scarlet—a perfect Hunter's Moon. Awed by the sight, we were silent for a
while. Then, one attendee spoke to the moment by sharing a folktale concerning the Wild Hunt and the
Autumn Hunter's Moon.

When the sounds of howling dogs and screaming hags fill the air with hunters following behind calling,
"Wod! Wod! Midden in dem Weg!" the wise traveler will immediately cover his eyes and throw his or
her body face down into the middle of the road. If he or she is lucky, no harm will come other than the
cold feet of the Black Dogs running over them and a lingering sniffle from lying in the muddy road. If
not, the tormented souls and spectral hunters on great back horses with burning red eyes thundering
overhead will catch up the unwary into their host and be forever after at the beck and call of The Hornéd
Man, their leader. Those who join in get a piece of human flesh as their share of the nightly booty. He
finished by saying, "When you hear the horns, hide, because anyone who is caught up in the Hunt will never
be the same again..." and launched into a spirited rendition of Sally Oldfield's "Night of the Hunter's
Moon."

This folk tradition of ghostly riders accompanied by hellhounds and tormented souls who thunder
through the sky in the train of the Hornéd Man is a hoary tale from our collective past. Folklorists often
refer to it as an "explanation story" for a thunderstorm, and though the details may vary, at the heart it
is always the same: during the Hunter's Moon a thundering horde of faeries, lost souls, baying hell hounds,
and hunters mounted on black horses with iron hooves and fiery red eyes ride across the autumn sky. Those
caught by this "Furious Host" never live to tell the tale because they've been forced to join the hunt, or,
if not, they are driven to madness by the sight. Early in the twentieth century, mythologist H. A. Guerber
said,

The object of this phantom hunt varied greatly, and was either [that of] a visionary boar or wild horse,
white-breasted maidens who were caught and borne away bound only once in seven years, or the wood nymphs,
called Moss Maidens, who were thought to represent the autumn leaves torn from the trees and whirled away
by the wintry gale. (1909/1992)

In Germany, the "prey" of the Wild Hunt were "Wood-Wives" who could escape by fleeing to and
crossing a rowan tree—long held to be a tree sacred to fairies. In some places, this hunt is led by the
Devil himself and occurs on Ash Wednesday.

Some folklorists believe this image to be a "memory" of time past when women were carried away by
raiders and invaders from foreign lands. Ari Berk and William Spytma (2002) explain the Wild Hunt this
way:

The Wild Hunt...is ancient in origin, an embodiment of the memories of war, agricultural myth, ancestral
worship, and royal pastime. Its most complete and well-documented traditions lie with the peoples of
Northern Europe; however, there are reflections of the Hunt anywhere in literature or folk tradition where
the dead travel together over the land, or heroes rise up to rout a foreign foe, or where representatives
of the sovereignty of the land are pursued and hunted.

Berk and Spytma go on to say that in the Norse tradition, the Hunt is sometimes shown as...

...chasing a beautiful Otherworldly maiden—perhaps a memory of grim night chases conducted by invading
armies for purposes of stealing wives from their enemies. Such imagery also seems to refer to struggles
for supremacy between rising patriarchal gods (embodied in the Hunt and its antlered warrior leader) and
ancient European goddess cults. (Berk and Spytma, 2002)

The Wild Hunt is also used by modern fantasy novelists exploring "faery" such as Peter Beagle in his
classic tale, Tamsin (1999); Guy Gavriel Kay's trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry
(1984), Charles de Lint's tales set in the fictional town of "Newford," and Emma Bull's original War
for the Oaks (2001). In fantasy fiction, the Wild Hunt is often described in the language of Scots
Gaelic as the Unseelie or "unholy" fairy court. This court is presided over by the Queen of Air and
Darkness and her consort, The Hornéd Man or the Green Man in one or several guises. Crossing genres
slightly into science fiction, Poul Anderson's classic tale, The Queen of Air and Darkness
(1973) used this imagery to create a world where war is immanent between human colonists and an elusive
alien race. Not to be left out of this list is epic fantasist Robert Jordan's use of the imagery of The
Wild Hunt in his Eye of the World series in The Great Hunt (1990).

Literary Tropes, W.B. Yeats, Trooping Fairies, and Solitary Fairies

The twin fairy courts of Scots' lore are Summer fey or sidhi (seelie), who are beautiful and generally
good-natured (if mischievous) spirits associated with love making, music, reveling, agriculture, and the
natural world. Winter bogans and goblins (unseelie) are up to no good and include such creatures as
murderous Far Darrig (Red Caps), Night Mares (mareridt), the Yorkshire nursery-room bogeys Genny Greenteeth
and Black Anis, "black dogs" (including the Yorkshire Barghest hound that haunted Sherlock Holmes), and the
Wild Hunt. While this classification has become a literary trope used throughout the genre (particularly
in urban fantasy), the folk traditions are more ambiguous. Early writers, such as Irish poets Jane
Francesca Agnes (Lady Wilde) and Wm. Butler Yeats (that unqualified expert on faery) divide the fairy
courts into "Trooping Fairies and the Solitary Fairies" (1888). Trooping fairies are called such because
they tend to go in long processionals (such as is described in the ballad, "Tam Lin") while solitary
fairies live in—as the name suggests—solitude and dislike company. Yeats (1888) has this to say about
trooping fairies, "Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most
beautiful music."

Current writers, such as Brian Froud (2000, 2008) and Nancy Arrowsmith (1997), divide the
classifications further: "good," bad," "light" (friendly, good natured), "dark" (wicked and spiteful), and
"dusky" beings who are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, such as the Gaelic sea-going merrows or the
Welsh Tylwyth Teg ("the fair folk").

The Wild Hunt is a party, under Yeats' classification system, of trooping fairies. Arrowsmith would
call them "dark fairies," while Froud would say these creatures are just plain bad. The King of the
Tylwyth Teg is Gwyn ap Nudd, who is depicted, at times, as the leader of the Wild Hunt. Christina Rosetti
(1856/1997) also found a troop of what could be called "unseelie" in her classic poem, "Goblin Market":

...The wicked, quaint-merchant men,

Their fruits like honey to the throat

But poison in the blood...

(Rosetti, ln. 553-5)

One finds the echoes of these denizens of the twilight realms in de Lint's "Hard Men" in Forests
of the Heart (2000) and "bogans" in Widdershins (2006). These tales darkly echo the
trope once used by educated ladies in Paris salons of dividing the fairies into "good" and "evil" in tales
called préciosité. A literary style called précieuse, invented by literary-minded aristocratic women,
called précieuses, retold fairy tales much in the same spirit as modern "faery" genres within fantasy
fiction. Literary précieuse style was an influence on Charles Perrault in his collections of fairy stories
for children, which altered and expurgated stories from oral folk traditions. Unlike modern fantasy, the
heroes and heroines of fairy tales written by the précieuses often appeared as shepherds and shepherdesses,
royal or noble by nature or birth, where their natures are tested and—generally—remain unclouded by
circumstance.

Halloween and the Hunter's Moon

In most of the Northern Hemisphere, November is when harvest ends and winter weather begins with the
ancient festival of Halloween. Our ancestors from France to Scandinavia knew to stay indoors and away from
wild heaths and lonely roads, with the shades drawn and the fires lit, between November eve (Halloween)
the feasts of Winter Solstice (Yule) and Twelfth Night (January 5), when the returning light could be
visibly measured. This was the time when the unpredictable and wicked unseelie faeries would "go abraid."
It is when the Hunter's Moon rises at the cusp of Winter's dark, stormy days and the time of the Unseelie
Court that the Wild Hunt is to be seen. This "cavalcade" is associated with the dark days and fallow time
between November eve (Halloween—which according to Yeats is when the taidhbhse tais (ghosts) are abroad
and "... dance with the fairies.") (1888) and Winter Solstice.

The Wild Hunt is known by names such as Wotan's Horde, Wilde Heer, or Wilde Jagd,
and Wuet's Army in Germanic lore, the Familia Herlechini ("Family of Harlequin") or Mesnee
d'Hellequin in France, the Oskorei (Horrific or Thunderous Ride) or Gandreid (Ride of the
Dead) in Norway, Odensjakt (Odin's Hunt) in Denmark and Sweden. In English speaking countries it is
referred to as The Furious Host, The Faery Rade, or Woden's Hunt.

Riding alongside the Wild Huntsman are hellhounds sometimes called Whist (eerie) Hounds. The reputed
home of the hounds is in Devon where an ancient oak copse called "Wistman's Wood" is located on the banks
of the West River Dart. Elsewhere the hounds are called Gabble Retchets or Gabriel's Hounds - not for the
Archangel, Gabriel, but from an old word for corpse. In Cornwall it's "the Devil's Dandy Dogs" who thunder
about scaring the living daylights out of travelers. One story chronicled is this one from Edwin Sidney
Hartland in his 1890 edition of English Fairy and Other Folk Tales:

A herdsman was journeying homeward across the moors of Cornwall one windy night when be heard at a
distance the baying of bounds, which he was not long in recognizing to be the dismal yelp of the Devil's
Dandy-dogs. He was three or four miles distant from his home; and, much terrified, he hurried onward as
fast as the treacherous nature of the soil and uncertainty of the path would allow; but the melancholy
yelping of the hounds and the fiendish shout of the hunter came nearer and nearer. After a long run they
appeared so close upon him that he could not help turning round to look at them. He was horror-struck, for
he could distinctly see the hunter and his dogs. The huntsman was terrible to behold. He was black, had
large fiery eyes, horns, a tail, and carried in his clawy-hand a long hunting-pole. The dogs, a numerous
pack, blackened the ground as far as it could be seen, each snorting fire and yelping in the most frightful
tone. What was the poor rustic to do? No cottage was near, no rock, no tree to shelter
him—nothing remained but to abandon himself to the fury of these hell-hounds. Suddenly a happy
thought flashed into his mind. He had been told that no evil spirit can resist the power of prayer. He
fell on his knees, and at the first holy words he uttered the hounds stood still, but yelped more dismally
than ever; and the huntsman shouted, "Bo Shrove I!" which "means," says the narrator, "in the old language,
The boy prays!" The black huntsman then drew off his dandy-dogs, and the poor herdsman hastened home as
fast as his trembling frame permitted.

The leader of The Wild Hunt is often a fierce man with the horns of a stag or a ram. Other times he is
depicted as headless. A published account of peasants seeing this "furious host" galloping across the sky
is in an obscure medieval text chronicling the life of monks, reported to have occurred at the onset of the
rule of a disastrous and cruel abbot of the order:

The first full description of a procession of ghosts was written in Paris about a night in January of
1092 (Ordericus Vitalis). The priest Wachlin, coming back from visiting a sick person, saw a swarm led by
an enormous warrior swinging a mighty club in his hand. The shapes that followed wept and moaned over
their sins; then came a horde of corpse-bearers with coffins on their shoulders—the priest counted some 50
coffins. Then women on horseback, seated on saddles with glowing nails stuck into them; then a host of
ecclesiasticals on horseback. The priest knew many of these people who had died recently. He concluded at
last that he had seen the "familia Herlechini," of whom many had told him, but in whom he had never
believed: Now he had truly seen the dead. (Gundarsson, 1992).

Again foretelling disaster for a medieval monastery, in the British Peterborough Chronicle, the
chronicler attests to the Wild Hunt's appearance. Around the year 1132, an anonymous monk wrote:

Then the hunters were black and large and terrifying, and their hounds were all black and broad-eyed and
terrifying, and they rode on black horses and black goats... (c. 1132; Ingram, London, 1823)

The Hunt is also reputed to contain the souls of unbaptised children, cannibalistic hags, and criminals hanged for murder. It is led by a spectral, and always terrifying figure
variously called Wotan, Knecht Ruprecht (or Krampus), Berchtold (or Berchta), Holle (or Hulda), and Selga.
Historical figures are sometimes shown leading the Hunt including Sir Francis Drake (called "Old
Crockern"), Charlemagne, Eadric the Wild (a Saxon rebel during the Norman Conquest), and Roland the
Standard Bearer. King Arthur has had his turn at the head as well as lesser-known mythic figures: Hereward
the Outlaw, an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon leader also involved in resistance to the Norman conquest of
England, el comte Arnau, a legendary nobleman from Ripoll's known for his cruelty. He was cursed for his
cruelties (especially toward an abbess in Catalonia) to ride through the countryside on a black
"hell-steed" which breathed fire accompanied by fierce hellhounds.

In Germanic societies, The Wild Hunt was also known to be led by several female deities, Perchta,
Holda, and the White Lady known as Frau Gauden all led processions of unbaptized children and
witches through the night sky, extending their reign into Walpurgisnaught festivities. Even
Gudhrun Gjúkadottir, a heroine of the Norse saga, the Nibelungenlied, as Guro
Rysserova took her place at the head of the Wild Hunt. In Italy, Herodias, later called
Aradia in Stregheria lore, leads Italian witches in a sea hunt for wicked sailors. In parts
of England and Wales, the Huntsman is Gwynn Ap Nudd, called both Lord of the Dead and King of Welsh
"otherworld" Fairy realm of Cwn Annwn (anglicized as Avalon) and in Westphalia, we find the
Cailleac Bhuer, the Blue Hag or Black Annis who eats small children who wander too far from home
leading the horde. In some parts of Europe, Diana, the Roman hunter goddess associated with the moon leads
the host. For this event she wears antlers, an ancient symbol of both the hunter and the hunted. In
Shakespeare's day, it was Herne the Hunter who rode the night sky:

There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter

(Sometimes a keeper here in Windsor forest)

Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns,

And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know

The superstitious idle-headed eld

Receiv'd and did deliver to our age

This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

(Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.4.28-38)

In the ballad tradition we find a re-telling of Ovid's Orpheus and Eurydice as Sir Orefeo, the King of
Fairy. In it we find this verse describing the Fairy hunt or Rade:

There often by him would he see,

when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

the king of Faerie with his rout

came hunting in the woods about

with blowing far and crying dim,

and barking hounds that were with him;

yet never a beast they took nor slew,

and where they went they never knew.

(trans. Tolkien)

Some History, Samhain, and Dia de los Muertes

The autumn holiday Celts and Neo-Pagans commonly call Samhain or All-Hallows, and that our children,
friends, and neighbors call Halloween, is a very ancient feast day with roots as old as European
civilization itself. Samhain is generally translated from Goidelic-Celt (Irish, Scots and Cornish Gaelic)
as "Summer's End." In England, the holiday became All Hollows Eve, shortened by the changes in language
over centuries to All Hallows e'en and then to Halloween. During the early Middle Ages, the Church made an
attempt to assume the day into the calendar (as people insisted upon marking the holiday) as the night
before All Saints or All Souls Day, a day to go to mass and pray. During Puritan times, the All Hallows
e'en became, like most holidays, "evil and Pagan" a sin and a crime to celebrate punishable by ostracism
and even time spent in the "the stocks" in the public square. These early Protestants equated such things
not with Paganism, per se, but with what the English after Henry VIII called "the Old Religion":
Catholicism. Puritans felt the same way about Christmas, Carnival, Lent, Lady Day (The Feast of the
Assumption), May Day, and Easter—outlawing "frivolity" such as masking, mummer's plays, pantomimes,
and—especially—all forms of dance and folk drama. Their zeal is the root of the modern day fundamentalist
assault upon Halloween. These people also reveal their true agenda when they bring up the Mexican
celebration of Dia de los Muertes in the same breath.

During the Roman Empire, Halloween, called the Feast of Kalends, was the End of the Old Year, and
although the Celts may have celebrated it as the New Year (as the Medieval Welsh tradition of "Calendais"
suggests), when the calendar was set for most of Europe by Empirical decree, Samhain fell during "Kalends,"
the end of harvest and beginning of the "unlucky time": the fallow of the year. The New Year was
celebrated at the end of this fallow time, in late February or early March. Nobody did business, signed
contracts, traveled without a good deal of consideration, became engaged, accepted a commission in the
military, was coronated as royalty, or married during the unlucky months of the fallow. It is possible
that the custom of holding engagement parties and university entrance examinations in April and marrying
and granting degrees in June began in the Roman Empire.

It is an interesting aside to note that brides of those by-gone days would also have been
horrified at the thought of a May wedding, as the Goddess Maia (or, Britomartis as she was also called)
hated the institution of marriage and would curse them with unhappiness and infertility. These were so
important to the Romans that Ancient Roman brides wore saffron dyed tunicas and red veils as an act of
sympathetic magic to ensure prosperity and fertility. An end-of-harvest "Kalends" wedding certainly would
have caused scandal.

The Days of the Dead—Dia de los Muertes—are celebrated at the same time as
our Samhain by Latino cultures and are a mixture—in a wonderful, creative, living folkloric sense—of native
customs of Mexican, Meso- and South American Harvest festivals and imported Spanish culture that included
Carnival and Moorish customs from N. Africa. Paper roses, marigolds, "deaf feasts," beautiful
altares with animales and angelitos, spending the day cleaning and decorating the tombstones and
picnicking on the graves of relations are customs from S. America and Mexico. Dia de los Muertes
has become a popular holiday throughout the American Southwest with parades, festivals, and parties, each
one reflecting and incorporating the culture of the region. For example, in Albuquerque's Old Town, where
I recently visited, a veritable festival of chilies, music, and cuisine reflecting the desert peoples of
New Mexico is to be enjoyed by one and all. In San Francisco, a festival with music, dancing and beautiful
public altares is to be found throughout the week leading up to Dia de los Muertes. During
the celebrations, the dead are seen as returning for one night of revelry in a grand procession of
animales, departed relatives, saints, and angelitos: the souls of recently dead children. The dead
are welcomed, spoken to, and invited to share in a feast laid out for them by relations.

We wear costumes and masks during this season for a couple of reasons: it is the "memory" of
Carnival, the great festival held in Europe mostly just before Lent, but in some places, as the celebration
of Martlemas or Martinmas on November 11. In Celtic countries, people went masked on Samhain night (the
Celts, as you may recall, went Everywhere, and took their bagpipes with them). Gang abraid on
Samhain night was a little dangerous, the fairies (like the dread Phuka, Wil'o'the Wisp, or Kelpies) and
(unlike the angelitos of Dia de los Muertes), the "unrestful" dead relations in Celtic lore
played nasty tricks on the living and tended to drop body parts around. In order to stay "invisible" to
such beings, one traveled in disguise. If you were unlucky enough to meet Feys or Sidhi abroad, an Irish
traveler would offer a gift of acorns, hazelnuts, and rowanberries. It was also an old custom that the
harvest not brought in by All Hallows at the edges of the fields, was left for the "Tinkers, Gypsies
[—not the same], gleaners, and fairies"a sharing of the wealth. Of course, by November, the
weather in the British Isles would have made harvesting fairly miserable in any event.

...and, here I found the Wild Hunt...

In very ancient times, November was also the time when culling of the herds was completed. The Wild
Hunt that races through the sky during the red Hunter's Moon of the fall is connected to the culling,
butchering, curing, and storing of meat for the winter ahead. With the culling of the herds, the death and
funerary imagery of The Wild Hunt and Riding of the Dead on Samhain becomes clear. While there is a
specific date and time for the Hunter's Moon in both British and Native American lore: generally, the first
Full Moon after the Harvest Moon (the Full Moon nearest the Autumnal equinox) around mid-October, it is
also discussed in folk traditions as the autumn full moon when it appears to be red. The bright red hue
was equated with the blood of the hunt and the culling of the herds.

Today, we know that when the moon in autumn rises deep red, it is the atmospheric conditions of the
season and the likelihood of smoke in the air that changes the moon's color from white to golden (the
"Harvest Moon") to deep crimson (sometimes called a "bloody" or "sanguine moon"). The moon also changes
from its normal white to a deep scarlet during a lunar eclipse. The early evenings of November would have
found our ancestors gazing at the moon rising against a dark evening sky. The optical illusion on the
horizon of a brilliant red full moon is such an evocative sight that one can imagine the Hornéd Man and his
Wild Host galloping over the horizon.

Young men in Norway enacted the Wild Hunt at Winter Solstice until the beginning of the 20th century.
Costumed and masked, their task was to punish those who violated the rural traditions, usually by stealing
beer and livestock. If the riders were given food and drink, however, they brought prosperity. The
figures of the Hunt populate the folklore of many winter seasonal celebrations: it is easy to see the
Hornéd Man in the British Holly King at Winter Solstice. Until recently, Mummers during their seasonal
performances in Richmond, Yorkshire would sing,

My hide unto the Huntsman

So freely I would give,

My body to the hounds,

For I'd rather die than live:

So shoot him, whip him, strip him,

To the Huntsman let him go;

For he's neither fit to ride upon,

Nor in any team to draw.

Poor old horse! You must die! (trad.)

In the Alps, Krampus with his Perchten followers is an "incubus" or anti-saint who
accompanies St. Nicholas the two weeks of December. Krampus scolds and punishes incurably wicked
children with a "light birching." In the Eastern Alps on Dec. 5, Kranpusnaught, young men in
grotesque masks cavort in the streets whipping young women with birch brooms and generally scaring
children. In Victorian times, the devilish and horned Black Peter or Black Rupert (who, after having been
thrown out of both Heaven and Hell, hunted "unclean souls") appeared during December revels. He also
accompanies St. Nicholas on his Saint's Day (Dec. 6) processionals as Knecht Ruprecht or
Rupelz in Alsace. As an aside, an article on Rotten.com reports that,

During World War II, Krampus shamefully pandered to the Nazis in such postcards, doing a series of
propaganda appearances in which he trounced and embarrassed British and French citizens and soldiers.
After WWII, it was rumored that Krampus fled to Brazil and took part in an evil cloning scheme, but our
team of investigators has failed to confirm those reports.

The story of the Wild Hunt remains with us today: Hern the Hunter is said to appear frequently when
Britain is under threat of invasion in and around Windsor Great Park. As recently as the 1950s, he was
said to appear near Windsor Castle where he frightened three young boys. In Fabulous Creatures,
Mythical Monsters, and Animal Power Symbols: A Handbook, Cassandra Eason (2007) writes:

...three boys were damaging trees when one saw a hunting horn and picked it up and blew it. Immediately,
baying hounds were heard close at hand, plus the obligatory huge dark shadows. It is told that two of the
boys ran to a convenient nearby church. But the third boy, the one with the horn, fell. The hounds were
very close, an arrow was heard being shot from a bow and the boy died, though no arrow and no injury that
could be seen.

Hern and the Wild Hunt was reported in 1962 when he appeared on a white stag before a group of boy
scouts in Windsor Park, (Ogden, 1999), although this may be an urban legend based upon the account about it
in Eason's book. The last sighting of reported was in 1976, when a guardsman on duty at the Castle claimed
that a statue in the Italian garden grew horns and came to life. The guardsman claimed to have had no
prior knowledge of the Herne legends. (Ford, 2001). David Nash Ford on his site, Royal Berkshire History,
recounts this legend from Devon:

To those who believe in the supernatural there is certain proof. One night, in February 1855, a series
of, what appeared to be, hoofprints were discovered in the snow all across South Devon. They stretched over
one hundred miles, from Teignmouth to Exmouth, at one point jumping the two mile wide Exe Estuary. The
prints went up walls and over roofs, and their appearance soon became known as "The Great Devon Mystery."
However, the locals all knew from whence the prints came: They were the work of the Devil and his Wild
Hunt. To return to Windsor, a man living in Burnham (Bucks) once heard Herne and his followers thundering
through the night's sky above his house. In the morning he discovered hoofprints impressed right over his
roof! (2001)

My search for the Wild Hunt came to a (temporary) end in the American West with a performance of the
familiar cowboy standard, "Ghost Riders in the Sky", at a music venue in the unlikely locale of Berkeley,
California by singer-songwriter Doug Blumer. "Ghost Riders in the Sky" is a folk song written in 1948 by
songwriter, Stan Jones. On can quickly see the connection between the tales of the Wild Hunt and this
tune. Oral tradition has it that Stan Jones, as a young boy, rode to the top of a hill in Arizona to check
on a windmill. A "mighty storm was a-brewin' up" and the blades had to be locked down to prevent damage.
As he worked, the lightning flashed and the wind blew, an old cowhand told him that if he weren't careful,
"The devil's herd would be after them both...." Sure enough, in the boiling clouds, Stan could make out
the angry red eyes, the pounding hoofs of the herd, and the shouts of the devil's phantom cowpokes
themselves. Feeling the hot breath of the herd behind him, the terrified boy leaped on his horse and rode
home as fast as he could. Forty years later, Stan Jones sat on his front porch in the (aptly named) Death
Valley and wrote the immortal country standard made famous by the likes of The Sons of the Pioneers, The
Westerlies, Peggy Lee, Gene Autry, and Johnny Cash and still performed today at the Grand Old Opry by a
new generation of "pickers and strummers":

Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel,

Their horns were black and shiney and their hot breath he could feel.

A bolt of fear shot through him as he looked up in the sky,

For he saw the riders comin' and he heard their mournful cry.

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo, ghost riders in the sky.

(1948, Stan Jones)

In popular music, beyond the rock band Therion and Sally Oldfield's 1970's folk song mentioned at
the beginning of this essay, according to oral rock and roll legend (accredited to band member, guitarist
Robby Krieger) this song also inspired Jim Morrison's final song, the haunting "Riders on the Storm":

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out alone

Riders on the storm... (Morrison, 1971)

The Wild Hunt lives on in fantasy literature and music, even in recent films such as Ghost
Rider (2007) and Valeri Roubintchik's The Wild Hunt of King Stakh (1980).

Finally, to bring this tale into 2009, several folk "faerie" performers have recorded songs concerning
the Wild Hunt. Some are better than others, but there are a couple worth mentioning: Chalice &
Blade, offers their first CD, "Wild Hunt"; a Berkeley metal band called Wild Hunt is making some
waves, and at the other end of the music spectrum Frasnz Liszt's early Romantic composition Wild Hunt 8
in C Minor, recorded recently by Earl Wild and Russell Sherman, has received good reviews.

And so ... my search continues, in music stores and libraries. What has it brought me? At least I will
know what to do if I hear the horns of The Hunt on some lonely road in autumn when a red moon rises...or, I
think I do.

COMMENTS!

Andre Norton used the wild hunt in several books in the High Hallack stories in the Witch World series, calling it That Which Runs the Ridges. At its center was a maiden being chased by the wild hunt. In a later story, the maiden is freed from the Wild Hunt and turns out to be the sister of the Lord of the Hunt.